Demjanjuk Is ‘Ivan,’ Camp Survivor Insists : Witness Blurts Out ‘There He Is!’ and Points to Ex-U.S. Auto Worker in Israeli Courtroom

Pinchas Epstein, who at the age of 17 was forced to remove corpses from the gas chambers of Treblinka, the World War II Nazi extermination camp in Poland, pointed across a courtroom here Monday and identified John Demjanjuk as the sadistic camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

“Here, he is sitting here!” Epstein blurted out, interrupting prosecuting attorney Michael Shaked as he began to ask a question. “There he is!”

Admits Inconsistencies

Under cross-examination, Epstein, a retired crane operator, conceded that there were inconsistencies between his testimony here and statements he made earlier about his experience in Treblinka. Demjanjuk’s attorney, Mark O’Connor, said his cross-examination was meant to challenge not Epstein’s sincerity but the accuracy of his memory.

The confrontation came in the fifth and by far the most dramatic day yet of the war crimes trial of Demjanjuk (pronounced DEHM-yahn-yook), the Ukrainian-born former auto worker who emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled in suburban Cleveland. In 1981 he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and last year was extradited to Israel to stand trial. He contends that he is a victim of mistaken identity and that he was never at Treblinka.

If convicted, he could face the death penalty for war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity.

This is Israel’s second war crimes trial. In 1962, Adolf Eichmann was convicted and hanged as the architect of what Nazi Germany undertook as the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”--the systematic extermination of a people.

Demjanjuk is being tried on the stage of the 300-seat Jerusalem concert hall, and Epstein is the first of eight Treblinka survivors expected to testify. An overflow crowd of spectators started lining up outside the hall two hours before the session began at 8:30 a.m. Later in the day it was announced that future sessions will be held in a larger hall.

Those who squeezed in Monday sat or stood riveted as Epstein, now an Israeli citizen, described in gruesome detail the operation at Treblinka. He said he was a forced laborer there for 11 months, from the fall of 1942 until he escaped with a handful of others in August of 1943.

‘Imbedded in My Memory’

Several spectators applauded when Epstein accused Demjanjuk of being the guard “Ivan,” and Chief Judge Dov Levin interjected angrily: “Quiet in the hall! This kind of thing will not be done and will not be heard in the halls of justice in Israel!”

A few minutes after Epstein had pointed out Demjanjuk, Shaked, the prosecutor, asked him to reconsider, and Epstein replied that the face of “Ivan” was “indelibly imbedded in my memory.”

He estimated that “Ivan” was between 22 and 25 years old when he was at Treblinka and added: “A man of that age has not changed to this day to the extent that he would become unrecognizable. I dream of ‘Ivan’ every night.”

Then Epstein pointed again at Demjanjuk and, pounding for emphasis on the witness stand, said, “There he is, right in this very hall.”

‘This Is the Man’

“Please,” Judge Levin cautioned, “do not become overly excited.”

“I apologize,” Epstein said. “But still, this is the man--the man sitting over there. I see him, I see him, I see him.”

As he had at the four previous sessions, Demjanjuk, now 66, sat expressionless.

“He’s heard most of it before,” his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., told reporters. He referred to nine years of U.S. legal proceedings that preceded his father’s extradition.

Epstein, who will be 62 next Tuesday, broke down frequently as he described acts of brutality by “Ivan” and other camp guards.

Victims Were His Prey

“I understand that this testimony is very difficult for you,” Judge Levin told him. “But since you have been called to testify, we ask that you do so to the extent that it is within your powers.”

“Your honor, I shall do my best,” Epstein promised.

” . . . I don’t know how to describe this ‘Ivan,’ ” he continued. “He wasn’t even an animal. I know that animals, when they are satisfied, do not attack. . . . ‘Ivan’ was never satisfied. He would prey upon his victims every day, every night.”

He tearfully recalled that he and other Jewish laborers once found a young girl, 12 or 14 years old, who had somehow managed to survive among the corpses in the gas chamber. And he said her words--”I want my mother”--ring in his ears to this day.

According to Epstein, “Ivan” picked out one of the other laborers, identified only as Jubas, whipped him brutally and ordered him to have sex with the girl.

Girl Shot to Death

He said he could not see what actually happened but called it “an act of obscenity on this little girl.” Later, he said, she was taken to an open pit where the corpses were thrown and was shot to death. “I didn’t see who shot her,” he said.

Epstein, a slender, bespectacled man of medium height with reddish-brown hair that makes him look younger than he is, was the prosecution’s second witness. The first, who was on the stand for three days last week, was Yitzhak Arad, an authority on the Holocaust and director of Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial.

Epstein is a native of Czestochowa, Poland. He said that in 1942, on the night after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and a Jewish High Holy Day, he and his family--his parents, two brothers and a sister--were loaded into freight cars along with hundreds of other Jews. They arrived at Treblinka the following day, and the car doors opened onto what he described as “a horrifying sight (that) I have no words to describe.”

People were screaming and shouting as they were forced off the cars, he said. There was a bathtub full of water nearby, but it was only “bait.” “Anyone who approached it was hit over the head with the butt of a rifle.” He said two corpses were already on the ground, their skulls split open by such blows.

Saw Many Killed

An officer of the Nazi’s Schutzstaffel, or SS, the elite corps that provided concentration camp guards, walked among the newcomers and picked out a few, including Epstein, for labor details. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

He said that when his younger brother, David, saw him being pulled aside and tried to approach him, David was felled by a rifle blow that “cracked open his skull. . . . I never saw him again.”

For the first three days, Epstein said, he worked in the camp’s arrival area, carrying old people and infants too weak to move from the railroad cars to a camouflaged pit that he thought at first was a hospital. There they were killed.

He described seeing two infants writhing on a smoldering fire and said, “The crying of these babies is ringing in my ears to this day.”

Epstein added: “I still remember that in the pit there were corpses with their heads severed. I was 17 years old, Your Honor. I had never seen a corpse until that point. . . . I was absolutely paralyzed.”

‘A Mountain of Corpses’

Epstein said he was soon transferred to the so-called upper camp, where the gas chambers were, and that “the sight . . . was horrifying. . . . There was a mountain of corpses.” His job, he said, was to take naked corpses from the gas chambers and throw them into mass graves. Several months later, he said, he helped to reopen the graves so that the rotting bodies could be incinerated.

While in the upper camp, he said, he saw the engine room containing the pumps that forced deadly gas into the chambers.

“I saw someone go into this room,” he said, “and later on I was told that this was ‘Ivan,’ ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ I saw this man, a big, thickset man who operated the engine. Then we would wait 20 minutes or half an hour, and then we were told to open the doors very wide and remove the corpses. This ‘Ivan’ would come out of the engine room and beat us mercilessly. He would have a pipe, or sometimes a sword. He would crack skulls. Sometimes he would cut off ears. He committed the most dreadful atrocities on the corpses.”

Closely Cross-Examined

In nearly four hours of cross-examination, O’Connor questioned Epstein closely about the camp and his recollections of the German and Ukrainian SS men who ran it, comparing his statements with others he had made earlier before war crimes investigators in four countries.

“We cannot dispute your belief,” O’Connor told the witness. “We are looking now as attorneys and as judges at the objectivity of what now is concealed in your mind so we can have it objectively put before the court.”

Epstein admitted that a 1960 deposition he had signed contained a description of the removal of sick people from the gas chambers that would have been “impossible.” He also conceded that he “did not phrase . . . very well” a previous description of the division of labor among German and Ukrainian SS men assigned to the engine room.

O’Connor’s cross-examination is expected to continue through today’s session.